I Felt Bad at My Daughter’s School Pizza Party- Until I Didn’t

Parental dread, careful planning, and an unexpected plot twist

As I’ve written before: the words “pizza” and “party” aren’t best friends when doing life with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). Anyone living with T1D knows how it can feel to nail the insulin timing for pizza (and how it can feel when you don’t).

So when my daughter’s school announced that all classes with full participation in the move-a-thon fundraiser would win a pizza party, my stomach dropped.

The move-a-thon went on to generate a whopping six figures. This is unsurprising seeing as my daughter’s public school does fundraising large. They will send home your child’s colorful art portfolio with a letter stapled to the front: We have a $100k goal to keep things like this coming home. Glossy flyers are shamelessly stuffed into homework packets, emails have a donation button that’s hard to miss, fundraising goals are displayed outside of classroom doors, and room parents may even text you directly to ask you to pitch in (again) to make sure that the teacher’s holiday shines even brighter.

So when it came to the move-at-thon, parents and kids were spammed from every direction with nudges to sign up and give big. Even carbs were enlisted for enticement: Any class with full student fundraising participation would win a pizza party.

At home we have worked to master tricky carbs of which pizza is a top contender. My husband had the brainy idea to create a shared Apple calendar called “A Day in the Life with Insulin.” We can log detailed records of tricky food attempts: how much insulin was needed, when we sent what, what happened to blood glucose levels. We can even throw in a graph to give a visual to the outcome.

For now though, we try to keep those experiments at home.

I held off on signing up until a text arrived to inform me that we were one of just two class families who hadn’t registered yet. I knew, on a moral level, it was unfair to deprive my daughter’s classmates of their carb-meets-fat food bomb simply because pizza at school was more complicated for me.

So my husband and I devised a compromise: I would make my daughter a pizza from scratch at home and bring it to school. The health office staff agreed to let me take charge of her insulin pump controller.

I realized upon waking that we were out of flour. I dashed to the closest store to pick some up and threw the ingredients into the bread maker before running to the dentist’s office for a cleaning. Before stepping out the door, I thought to check if the sauce in the fridge was still good. Predictably, since time has a way of conspiring against you when you most need it to comply, it had spoiled since the last at-home pizza party. I managed to return to the same store in a mad sprint and carried the overpriced sauce in my bag to the dentist.

Back home, dough complete, I pulled out chunks at a time and weighed the amount that was to become a small personal-sized pizza. I tried to envision the size of the slices that would be passed around the table and questioned if the pizza pie I’d be serving up looked a tad too meager, too sad.

After frantically rolling with the best make-shift rolling pin I could find (a plastic water bottle), I layered on some sauce and sprinkled on not one but four different cheeses — herbed goat, mozzarella, parm, and feta. My girl deserves to feel extra special, so I took the time to prepare a bottle of flavored sparkling water and a small metal cup with some extra parmesan should she choose to sprinkle it on the finished product.

Precious cargo slipped inside a Costco macaron box for safe keeping, I made my next 1,500-meter sprint to school.

I grabbed the insulin controller and found my girl to send over the liquid gold that fuels her. She wanted to carry her box to lunch, but I was too concerned for a possible mishap. I insisted on playing faithful delivery person who goes the extra mile to get the order all the way to the table.

At the lunch tables, I spotted the pizza for the advertised party for the first time. It arrived on paper plates. I almost had to squint to see it. The small rectangular pieces were half the size of an iPhone.

My daughter had her hand on the parmesan cheese container, inverting the entirety on the top of what had been transformed into an XL pizza by virtue of comparison.

“Miss Emily!” came the voice of my daughter’s friend from down the table. “I want you to make me a pizza!”

I felt my daughter’s smile without seeing it. When I looked at her next she was sipping her flavored sparkling water and going in for a second piece.

Whines of disappointment surrounded us:

“I’m still hungry!”

“Is this all we get?!”

“Can I get seconds?”

“Can I get school hot lunch, too?”

Was the blood sugar level as beautiful as we’d hoped when doing pizza within the context of a school day? No. But this time it felt like a bigger win than even the biggest pizza meets insulin success story ever could.

“Am I normal?” my daughter had whispered through the darkness one night as I lay down next to her in her bed with the start of kindergarten not so many days away.

“No,” I had replied, “You’re more than normal. You’re extra-ordinary.”

Even as she notices difference imposed by T1D, despite our best efforts, I hope she feels that truth in her bones, with or without the pizza.